CSBG Archive

75 Greatest Friends and Foes of Batman: Villains #30-26

In honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Batman, we’re doing four straight months of polls having to do with Batman. Future installments will deal with Batman creators and stories, but this month will be about Batman’s allies and his villains.

You all voted, now here are the results (40 bad guys, 35 good guys for a total of 75)! Here is a list of all the characters revealed so far. We continue with Villains #30-26…

Enjoy!

NOTE: There’s so many images in these pieces that I’ll be breaking them up over two pages.

30. Clayface (Preston Payne)

Preston Payne’s tenure as the Clayface of record (I love comics because I can make statements like “the Clayface of record”) was not particularly long, but Len Wein, Marshall Rogers and Dick Giordano imbued him with so much pathos that he really stood out and it certainly seems like he was a major influence on the Batman: The Animated Series’ version of Mister Freeze. Check out his introduction…

That’s some powerful stuff right there.

29. Lex Luthor

At first I was surprised to see Luthor (the greatest creation by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, besides Slam Bradley, of course) on the list, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought about how Batman and Luthor really HAVE had some notable confrontations over the years. They clashed during No Man’s Land. Luthor FRAMED BRUCE WAYNE FOR MURDER. Batman then helped get Luthor removed from the U.S. presidency. But then it also occurred to me, Luthor was one of the villains during the classic “How I Killed Batman” storyline, so that’s reason enough for him to be on the list…

28. Lady Shiva

While Lady Shiva (who was first introduced in the Richard Dragon series by Denny O’Neil) is definitely a villain, it is interesting to note that she and Batman have rarely actually clashed, in part I imagine so that we wouldn’t have to learn the answer to who would win in a fight, as Shiva was known for being the best martial artist in the world. But they have crossed paths a number of times over the years, including when Shiva trained Batman after he was recuperating from his magic pixie girlfriend healing his back after the events of Knightfall (how in the world Shondra Kinsolving didn’t make it into Dark Knight Rises is beyond me). Here is their first meeting…

Tuomas

Man, that’s a nifty placement of a word balloon in Zsasz’s introduction!

Also, gotta give props to Breyfogle for drawing Zsasz without any scars on his back, as obviously it’d be a bit difficult for him to do clean cuts there. I think some other artists haven’t given it as much thought, and have drawn scars everywhere on his body.

Bill Williamson

Acer

More New Amalgams of note from this list:
-Lex Luthor was mixed with the Red Skull to make the Green Skull a foe of Super-Soldier (Superman/Captain America) and a founding member of the Secret Society of Evil (Secret Society of Super-Villains/Masters of Evil).
-Lady Shiva was mixed with Elektra Natchios to make Elektra Wu-San, aka Lady Erynys; former student of Sensei Stick (Sensei/Stick) of the League of the Hand (League of Assassins/The Hand), alongside the future Dr. Dare (Dr. Mid-Nite (Pieter Cross)/Daredevil); currently a member of the Ladybirds (Birds of Prey/Lady Liberators).
-Mr. Zsasz was mixed with Carnage to make Bloodshed, a foe of both Iron Bat and Spider-Boy (Superboy (Kon-El)/Spider-Man).

weezer17

Bill Williamson

The Last Arkham really was a fantastic story. It’s a shame that, with all this Arkham fanaticism following the release of the Arkham games, DC hasn’t seen fit to reprint it. It’s certainly much, much better than the B:TAS episode that was based on it.

M-Wolverine

Now this list is almost universally strong. And I didn’t even vote for any of them. Though this Clayface maybe should have been Waxface. Didn’t consider Lex enough of an enemy to make the list, but cool nonetheless. Wanted to vote for Zsasz, he’d have been my Grant choice, but couldn’t quite fit. And Shiva is cool. Though Bill is right, Death in the Family showed that while Shiva might even be a better Martial Artist, Batman’s size and strength and close ability give him the edge.

The depiction of Chill killing the parents is interesting after the Year One cover talk.

MarkAndrew

You have to shake your head at how incredibly stupid Joe Chill’s henchmen are, killing Chill before finding out who Batman is. And anyway, what proof does he have that he even made Batman? They should just think he’s taken leave of his senses. They completely take his word as the truth and shoot him immediately.

Dean Hacker

James

Preston has been one of my favourite Batman villains for the longest time. Mudpack is an amazing story, But his Batman annual appearance and 2 parter in Shadow of the Bat showed that so multiple writers from the 80’s-90’s got this tragic villain.

Its a real shame he isn’t used anymore.

Albert

I didn’t vote for Zsasz, but I’m glad to see him on the list. I remember buying the first issue of Shadow of the Bat off the rack when I was 12 or 13, and found it completely amazing. The absolutely chilling portrayal of that character was a big reason why. That story arc has remained one of my favorites, and not purely from nostalgia; like Alan Grant’s entire long run on various Batman comics, it holds up very well. unfortunately, no one else has ever done anything worthwhile with the character, aside from Paul Dini.

The Preston Payne version of Clayface was a character I always found pretty fascinating, too. I first encountered him in an issue of Shadow of the Bat that revolved around him having a child with the Sondra Fuller Clayface. I immediately sought out all the earlier issues that featured him I could find.

What novel was Lady Shiva introduced in prior to her comics appearances? I know she appeared in the Knightfall novelization, for instance, but this is the first I’ve heard of a pre-comics novel appearance, and a web search yielded nothing.

Omar Karindu

I voted for Zsasz at #7. The Batman writers could do more with the character.

Zsasz doesn’t really strike me as a character with a lot of range, so I’m quite curious about what more can be done with him. He’s supposed to be the “grounded” sociopathic killer to offset the comic-book insanity of the rest of the Arkham crew, but…well, he’s a guy who stabs people to death, and that’s about it. (Well, and his name is a dig at the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s.)

I always loved the bit with him in Hitman #2 or 3 where Zsasz lunges at the glass, only for Tommy to yawn and reply, “Sorry, I’ve already seen the movie.”

I know Richard Dragon was introduced in the paperback novel Dragon’s Fists that O’Neil wrote under the pseudonym Jim Dennis about a year before the DC Richard Dragon comic. Ben “Bronze Tiger” Turner was also introduced in Dragon’s Fists. I haven’t read it, so I can’t vouch for Shiva being in it, but that’s probably the novel we’re talking about.